Cuba, the federal issue in the 1901 Constituent Assembly (Essay).

Abstract

The intense federal debate that took place in the 1901 constituent assembly between Unitarians and Federalists occupied a significant place within that space of construction of the republican legal order in the period of the first American military occupation. There, the problem of the type of republic for Cuba was definitively settled, and, from the pro-independence perspective, a considerable number of federal projects were proposed, some of them coinciding with the North American Constitution of 1787, a sign of the influence of the American system on Cuban thought. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the controversy between various participants on the way in which the future Cuban republic should be organized. To this end, a wide bibliography on the 1901 Constituent Assembly was reviewed. The methods of analysis and criticism of the sources were used, among others, in order to infer, on the basis of the data obtained, the theoretical contributions that broaden the pre-existing gnoseology. The application of the method of the relationship between the historical and the logical allowed the concrete analysis of the historical situation at different times to form analytical and synthetic procedures. With this objective, it was concluded that the contradiction between Federalists and anti-Federalists was definitively settled for the period studied, when a unitary form of government was adopted, with municipal autonomy declared in the text of the Cuban Magna Carta.